He envisions playing PS4 games on all his devices, with the main experience on the big screen and smaller sections on mobile screens

Sony's PlayStation 4 event last week shed some light on the new console, but also left many questions unanswered. But a Sony exec recently sat down with The Guardian to fill in some of the gaps.

Shuhei Yoshida, Sony's head of worldwide studios who helped with the development of the PS4, talked about the PS4's role in the console ecosystem, the relevance of consoles in an increasingly mobile world and why Sony didn't produce hardware at last week's event.

According to Yoshida, the PS4 will be all about connectivity. This means that social aspects will be included in the gaming process through one simple application download, where users with iOS and Android devices can easily connect. Having access to the PS4 from anywhere on any device can help in other areas of gaming too, such as downloading a large, 50GB game. If one were to do this at home, it would take hours before the gamer could actually play. But if they connected to PS4 while still at work and started the download then, it will be ready for them once they arrive.

"In a couple of years I'd like to be playing PS4 games on all my devices, with the main experience on the big screen, and smaller sections on mobile screens… It will all be connected," said Yoshida.

While mobile devices can help create a connected environment for the console, it's a growing popular belief that the console doesn't even need to be apart of it since gaming, social networking, etc. can be accessed on the mobile devices themselves -- on the go. Yoshida said consoles still play a major role in gaming as long as the console is better than the tablet, smartphone, etc. as far as gameplay and graphics.

"Seriously, unless we show something unique and amazing, consumers won't be interested in dedicated hardware because they can play on devices they already own,” said Yoshida. “So if the experience on PS4 is not greater than tablet, why bother? It's our responsibility to provide that, with the hardware and system features as well as game development."

Yoshida said Sony is definitely working on gameplay for PS4 by offering titles beyond just driving and shooting games (which still dominate the console) and then offering titles of interest to the gamers based on past preferences.

Games are definitely a huge part of PS4, but there was one burning question that many gamers had on their minds after the PS4 event: where's the console?

"We have not finalised the hardware yet and decided not to try to get it finished in time," said Yoshida. "Also, it's a long time from February to launch, we have to design our communication in phases. Our focus here was to show some games and talk about the key principles – we wanted to save the unveiling of the actual console."

Unfortunately you cannot just get a bunch of specs that are "about equal" to a PS4 and call it comparable in performance. The hardware is custom designed, and highly optimized in the drivers and OS and will perform way better than a game designed on PC using the same specs. There are a number of huge optimizations that can be made because the hardware is identical on every device that cannot be made on PC.

Now I'm no console fanboy, I'm a hardcore PC gamer, but things like this are important to realize. You can get way more than trivial 3-5% performance gains from things like this. The hardware in the PS4 and xbox 720 may easily be able to achieve performance at a level equal to a 680 or 7970.

Hardly. This generation of hardware is much less so than the previous generation. They are taking existing designs and repackaging it for the needs of the company. Noting here was built from the ground up.

quote: and will perform way better than a game designed on PC using the same specs.... The hardware in the PS4 and xbox 720 may easily be able to achieve performance at a level equal to a 680 or 7970

I'm sorry, you are simply not going to squeeze that much extra performance out of the silicon with optimized drivers. 7970 has 72% more memory bandwidth, 48% higher texel rate, and is roughly equal to CrossFire 7870 cards in most benchmarks. The PS4's GPU is suppsed to be closer to a 7850 than a 7870. What you WILL see is developers be able to make design decisions based on the unified hardware which will translate into better looking effects overall, but you will not see an amazing, magical increase in hardware throughput like you believe.

People just don't seem to understand how inefficient the PC is for gaming. We've been able to throw lots of silicon at the problem to keep it at bay, but the simple fact is the PC has tons of graphics overhead that the PS4 won't.

Now sure, you can build a PC with better graphics than the PS4. But it's going to cost about three times more.

There's lots of articles and analysis out there that explains this. I encourage people who look at the PS4 hardware and think it's "weak", to educate themselves.

True Spoofe. But actually I was speaking of software inefficiency. Because the Windows platform must support hundreds of different video card and hardware combinations, there's LOTS of overhead in DirectX and the graphics rendering software.

The PS4 is purpose-built and streamlined to deliver the highest graphics performance with it's hardware. There's no comparison really.

1200W power supply? man you can build a high-end system on a 500W power supply... unless you go into the dual-card configuration you don't need a 1200W PSU.

A high-end GC needs at most 200-300W, the CPU not even 100W, the rest are just peanuts... if the consoles use roughly the same graphics processor and cpu there's no reason to think they will consume less...

True, and that is to run a game typically at 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and topping out at 2560x1440 (i.e. an iPad's resolution)! I have my PC (32GB Ram, Quad Core i7 )which I built sitting switched off the majority of the time these days because I rarely need to use it. I will either be in the family room using my Macbook Pro or iPad or if I'm doing Dev work on rare occasions, I will be remoting into my main PC from the Macbook, but these days this is rare. I could play a game on it, but I'd be stuck in the bedroom on my own which is pretty anti social. I recognise that for heavy dev work or video encoding (aka the usual desktop use-cases whih get trotted out) are getting increasingly niche for most people. Far from encouraging people to build gaming PC's to run console quality games in a slightly higher res I would say that few people need a desktop pc these days, with most not even needing laptops. When you look at how responsive a device like an iPad is on ARM architecture yet how little power it uses, it makes desktop PC's seem almost profligately wasteful.

quote: Wrong. The PS4 architecture absolutely crushes a gaming PC. It slays it...People just don't seem to understand how inefficient the PC is for gaming... There's lots of articles and analysis out there that explains this...

I know all about DirectX. Yes, it's an extra layer above the hardware the PS4 will not have to deal with, but if you think this will translate into a 2x or more performance increase, you're dreaming. To make such a bold statement that "it slays it", I hope you have something to back that up.

quote: I encourage people who look at the PS4 hardware and think it's "weak", to educate themselves.

Thus far we have nothing to go on but the meager amount of data Sony's released. From their figures, it's not nearly the colossus the PS3 was in its time.

quote: but if you think this will translate into a 2x or more performance increase, you're dreaming.

Clearly you've missed the point entirely. We're not talking about doubling the performance of the PC. There aren't even any games for that.

We're talking about comparative performance levels. People like you are apparently looking at the specs and going "OMG it's mid level PC gear the graphics will suck". Not understanding the highly efficient design. It WILL deliver state of the art graphics despite it's hardware. That is the point.

So yes, in terms of delivering graphics, the PS4 absolutely slays the PC. As I said, we overcome this problem on the PC side by throwing tons of silicon at the problem. That adds cost, however.

Your attempt to make a PC gaming build for around the same price as the PS4 had me holding my sides in laughter. For the money, a PC just cannot compete with the PS4 in terms of graphics rendering.

So you're aware of how the DX kernel works, the overhead of submitting DMA buffers, paging memory in and out, presenting frames and the codepath it takes through the kernel. Queuing frames and the extra work involved to ensure robustness on a generic platform. There are SO many things that can be optimized it's not even funny.

You're comparing Apple to Oranges, you do realize 100% of PC games are played at 1080p resolutions, console games on the other are mostly 720p, PC games also enjoy of better AA and other post processing techniques, you wouldn't even see the difference between playing a game on a low end PC at 720p and on a xbox360/PS3.

Jack up the resolution, the post-processing techniques, the number of polygons and you'll see how your PS3/xbox360 would do against a PC... with the PS4/Xbox720 it will be the same, better (or the same) frame rates at the expense of graphics quality.